Gingerbread Man

Gingerbread Man, gingerbread trees and gingerbread house, oh it's Christmas and will you be making some too? 

This year my children will be making some as gifts to go with the presents. 

This makes it a little special for family & friends as its all made by them. 

I like this simple gingerbread recipe, as it doesn't use all the mixed spices like nutmeg, clove & cinnamon.  I'm not too keen on all the strong spices with shop bought gingerbread biscuits but this recipe simple & nice. And children are less likely to eat it if there's too much spices. 

But you can add a little of each if you prefer. 

This is a great way to get your children involved in baking. 

Baking biscuits makes less mess and they get excited eating their own made bakes. 

Hokkaido chiffon cupcakes with vanilla custard cream

北海道蛋糕

I suppose I don't really need to introduce the Hokkaido chiffon cupcake.
It's like almost every baker new or experienced have attempted this already.

But what I like about this cupcake is that I can eat it almost immediately after baking.
To me, this is a baby version of the chiffon cake but in a cupcake case.
I've tried a few recipes and find that this one suits me more.
It's soft, fluffy & very delicious.

My family's top favourite cupcakes.

Ingredients:

(A)
3 egg yolks
30g sugar
45g oil
65g plain flour
60ml milk
1/2. Tsp vanilla extract

(B)
3 egg whites
45g sugar
1/4. Tsp cream of tartar

Method:

Whisk egg yolks with sugar until pale & fluffy.
Add oil and whisk well.
Add in the milk and vanilla extract & whisk to combine.
Fold in the sifted flour gently.

In a seperate bowl, whisk egg whites until frothy then add the cream of tartar.
Whisk to soft peak and add sugar gradually til you reach stiff peak.

Fold in the meringue to the yolk batter, fold in carefully not to deflate the batter.
Spoon into paper cases and bake in a preheated oven at 160c for 25 mins.

Once baked take out the oven and cool on a cooling rack.

You can pipe in cream and decorate with fruits & dust with icing sugar.

I made vanilla custard cream by adding a pot of ready made custard to freshly whipped cream.

Orange Chiffon cake

 

 

Oh my love for chiffon cakes, I've been making so many I've lost count. 

I still remember how my first failed miserably! 

I couldn't figure out what went wrong? It collapsed and the sponge was too heavy. 

 I blamed the recipe and moved on to another yet failing again! I've tried so many different recipes from the Internet to baking books not one gave me the perfect chiffon!  

I didn't want to give up so I started comparing different recipes on the internet. 

There were hundreds of variations and all the pictures looked so good with big fluffy cakes but none really gave me satisfiying results.

Fed up searching, I started to experiment with the last recipe which was quite close to a successful chiffon that I've baked.

I made 3 adjustments to it and I made my first "Perfect" chiffon cake! 

I'm sharing this recipe hoping you will never fail on a chiffon cake! 

Ever! 

But having said that, if you do fail it's not my recipe. 

It's probably your oven! 

I've given this recipe to a few friends and they all have different results! One from being under baked and the other over baked. I bake mines at 180c for an hour and it is perfect every time.

My recipe is for a large chiffon cake. I couldn't buy a smaller tube pan as they never have them in stock. So this is why I've created this recipe to fit into my huge 10 inch tube pan. 

So you'll need a 10 inch chiffon tube pan or you could split it into two smaller tube pans. 

But cooking time will be less. You need to work that out as I haven't baked anything smaller. 

This recipes is for an Orange chiffon cake, you can replace the orange juice with other liquids to make different flavours.